I love nougat. I am not alone in this either in the editorial office or in the country, but what I like is classic nougat. Let the modernities of exotic flavors be removed, the ham nougat, lollipop either of French fries. What I want is almond nougat or, above all, chocolate nougat with nuts or puffed rice.

The problem is that every year the same thing happens to me: I buy several and, at most, I eat one tablet, so the rest is left for next year… and it is no longer the same. This year I decided that I was going to make my own nougat for two reasons: to select the ingredients and that, if I have to eat a nougat, let it be my own.

I have found (and prepared) the perfect recipe for Suchard-type nougat. I’m going to tell you, but you have to be clear about something: this nougat is delicious, but it costs a fortune.

Simple ingredients. I was browsing the other day looking for the perfect Christmas recipe when I came across a Crazy Fire video. It is a channel that has very interesting easy recipes and one is the nougat that I like: chocolate with puffed rice. “Perfect, I told myself,” so I went to buy the ingredients:

• 200 grams of dark chocolate.
• 200 grams of milk chocolate.
• 100 grams of butter, butter or cocoa butter.
• 100 grams of puffed rice.

Even simpler process. In the video, Santi explains it very simply, and the preparation couldn’t be simpler:

• You pour water into a pot and, on top of it, place a bowl. In it, we put both the 400 grams of chocolate and the butter (in my case, margarine). We turn on the heat and begin to stir until the mixture melts.

• As soon as it has melted, remove the bowl from the heat source and add the puffed rice. Fuego Loco uses chocolate puffed rice, but to try to eliminate that extra sugar, I bought plain puffed rice, without any additions. You stir a little to mix everything and it’s almost there.

• We take a mold (whatever it is, here it only influences the shape), we line the mold with plastic wrap so that the chocolate does not stick to the walls and is easier to unmold, and we put it in the refrigerator.
• In about three hours we take it out, unmold it and we can eat it or store it.

It is not nougat to save. It’s very good. This is true and no one can deny it to me. In addition, it is very easy and taking into account the traffic jams in big cities, it is faster to make this nougat at home than to go buy one at the supermarket. Now, my goodness, how hard it is to do these things.

The advantage is that I can choose the ingredients, but on this occasion I didn’t want to go all out and buy extravagant raw materials with cocoa from specific origins or anything like that: chocolate with sugar and that’s it. The problem is that we are fully immersed in a cocoa inflationary spiral and that is being felt in the market. My ingredients were:

• Valor dark chocolate tablet of 200 grams – 3.35 euros.
• Two Valor milk chocolate bars of 100 grams each – 5.58 euros.
• Puffed rice – 1.99 euros for a 125 gram bag.

My nougat? 10.82 (and I already had the margarine at home and dark chocolate is what they sell with 52% cocoa). The price of a Suchard tablet? Just 3.99 euros. In my defense I will say that the classic Suchard tablet is 260 grams and with the Fuego Loco recipe it makes half a kilo of nougat, but it is clear that the price is not worth it. It’s not Dubai chocolate, but almost.

The tasting. About homemade nougat, I have to say a couple of things. The first is that it is spectacular. It’s not that I’m a great cook, it’s just that the chocolate is good and the puffed rice gives it a point. The second is that perhaps it is too much. You can reduce proportions (especially puffed rice) so that it is somewhat lighter.

It is very similar to Suchard’s or any of its kind, but also a little more macaco. It’s not cloying (or it doesn’t seem that way to me), but I find commercial nougat, while sweeter, also lighter when chewing. And the crunch of those commercial nougats is also somewhat more pronounced than mine. There it may be because of my rice, but it doesn’t affect the flavor at all.

Don’t let the rice pass. Although mine was delicious, in the process I realized something: the puffed rice I bought was not as crunchy as more commercial options (the sugary puffed rice cereal ones, oh my). It doesn’t bother me because I like the flavor, but if you want that crunchy bite, better with crispy or sweetened puffed rice.

Priorities. The good thing about this is that you can get as exquisite as you want. My chocolates, as it was for testing, are nothing out of this world and they are neither the most expensive nor the cheapest. Milk chocolate has more ingredients than I would like, but this way you are perfectly controlling what you put in your body and avoiding ingredients you don’t want.

I will surely fail to eat only one bar because, seeing the result with good but average chocolates, in a week I would like to repeat the process with more select chocolates. Now, there I know my wallet is going to cry, but Christmas is once a year.

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